Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 64. Today I'm talking with Benjamin Eberlei, about a bunch of RFCs related to Attributes. Hello Benjamin, how are you this morning?

I'm fine. I'm very well actually yeah. The weather's great.

I can see that behind you. Of course, if you listen to this podcast, you can't see the bright sun behind Benjamin, or behind me, by the way. In any case, we don't want to talk about the weather today, we want to talk about a bunch of RFCs related to attributes. We'll start with one of the RFCs that Benjamin proposed or actually, one of them that he has proposed and one of them that he's put into discussion. The first one is called attribute amendments.

Yes.

What is attribute amendments about?

So the initial attributes RFC, and we talked about this a few months ago was accepted, and there were a few things that we didn't add because it was already a very large RFC, and the feature itself was already quite big. Seems to be that there's more sort of an appetite to go step by step and put additional things, in additional RFCs. So we had for, for I think about three or four different topics that we wanted to talk about, and maybe amend to the original RFC. And this was sort of a grouping of all those four things that I wanted to propose and change and Martin my co author of the RFC and I worked on them and proposed them.

What are the four things that your new RFC was proposing?

Yes, so the first one was renaming Attribute class. So, the class that is used to mark an attribute from PHP attributes to just attribute. I guess we go into detail in a few seconds but I just list them. The second one is an alternative syntax to group attributes and you're safe a little bit on the characters to type and allowed to group them. And the third was a way to validate which declarations, an attribute is allowed to be set on, and the force was a way to configure if an attribute is allowed to be declared once or multiple times on one declaration.

Okay, so let's start with the first one which is renaming the class to Attribute.

Yeah, so in the initial RFC, there was already a lot of discussion about how should this attribute class be caught. Around that time that PhpToken RFC was also accepted, and so I sort of chose this out of a compromise to use PhpAttribute, because it is guaranteed to be a unique name that nobody would ever have used before. There's also, there was also a lot of talk about putting an RFC, to vote, about namespacing in PHP, so namespacing internal classes and everything. So I wanted to keep this open at the at the time and not make it a contentious decision. After the Attributes RFC was accepted, then namespace